Tabby Rose Makes Games

Hey! I'm Tabby, a UX and UI Designer from Toronto, Canada. I'm currently working on A Knight in the Attic, an Arthurian VR puzzle adventure game. In this portfolio you'll find examples of features I've developed and some thoughts on my process and problem solving across the user experience and interface spectra.

Engines and Programming:

Unity
Git (via Sourcetree, Fork)
C#
HTML/CSS/JS

Asset Creation:

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Affinity Designer
Clip Studio
Adobe Premiere
Marmoset Hexels

Prototyping and Collaboration:

Figma
Adobe XD
Miro
Jira
Asana
Trello
Google Docs/Sheets, Microsoft Suite

The Big Con

The Big Con (2021) was the first title I worked on for Mighty Yell Studios. I was originally tasked with reworking the "Notebook" feature of the game, as early playtests were showing that players missed this feature entirely or didn't know how to navigate it to get information they might need in order to solve puzzles.

Beyond the Notebook, I handled TBC's UX and UI at large and I was directly responsible for the title screen flow, pause menu flow, options menu flow, and the "Stickers" DLC feature. I also handled text input including font atlas prep/replacement for localization (including CJK) and accessibility. I also built an accessible website for The Big Con, and handled playtesting with AbleGamers Player Panels.

A Knight in the Attic

A Knight in the Attic (upcoming) is my most recent project, and a different challenge for me as it is a VR title. My main concerns from a UX perspective were making sure that it was comfortable and accessible for as many people as possible to play, and from a UI technical perspective, it was learning how to make UI work in world space for the first time. I wanted to make sure that UI panels were tactile and interactive so players could adjust them in space.

This was the first project that I had the chance to do more robust UX research for before production, and I created player personas as well as a cost-benefit analysis for possible accessibility features among other documentation. This project, like The Big Con also underwent accessibility testing with AbleGamers Player Panels.

Options Menu

This was one of the earlier features I prototyped and built since we knew early on what kind of options we would be included, following the UX research phase of the project. I used this feature to get used to working with VR UI. Although most of the game uses direct manipulation of objects, for this menu I opted to go with raycast targeting since this is somewhat easier to achieve fine-tuned motion with and is the main control modality on the platform itself (outside of the game). I started with creating a rough mock-up in Figma for the team, and once approved, did layout and animation scripting in Unity and Leantween.

Mock-Up

Final (Video)

Dialogue

In contrast to the Options, the Dialogue system was implemented much later in production and by then most key stylistic decisions had been made with regards to UI look and feel. Therefore for this feature I was able to create an animated mock-up in Figma for final behaviour that was much higher fidelity, and quite close to the final product. In this case, I prepped the final art and a static prefab and another programmer on our team handled scripting for this system.

The dialogue system also included an accessibility feature unique to VR: A marker that points toward the dialogue in case the player is turned away. This helps ensure they won't miss vital information, since dialogue isn't easily repeatable.

Mock-Up

Final (Video)

Quench

Quench (2019) was my first shipped title. I was responsible for Creative Direction, Narrative, Level Design and a number of other tasks for the game. I also handled UI for the first half of production, and directed another UI designer for the latter half of production while I looked after asset preparation, layout in-engine and animation.

I was additionally responsible for tutorialization in Quench, which ensured that small children or players with low video game literacy could learn and enjoy our game.

Weather Power HUD

Over its many years of development, Quench went through a number of iterations in the main heads-up display, which presented the main mechanic of the game: using weather powers to change the environment. Initially we thought to keep them to one or both sides, but eventually settled on the bottom centre as a natural resting spot for players' eyes during gameplay.

Later, when gamepad controls were added, a new modality for accessing these controls had to be created, which resulted in the "Power Wheel" modal shown below, which was designed to match the existing art treatment.